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Vanishing Points: Poems
The renowned Italian poet Valerio Magrelli has forged a unique approach for exploring the subtleties of language, a poetry of perception that takes the measure of its own veerings, "the exact degree / of deviation." His poems are histories of the inner life that turn into X-rays of the urban and the global, and press the intelligence into the service of the senses. Magrelli's poems condense the abstract and the intensely physical, subjecting modern experience to a minute and naked scrutiny. Not since Eugenio Montale has a poet brought together in one voice so many strands of the Italian lyric tradition and handled them with such originality.
- GenresPoetry
272 pages, Paperback
First published July 20, 2010
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About the author
Valerio Magrelli
94 books23 followersValerio Magrelli is an Italian poet.
He graduated in philosophy at the University of Rome and is an expert in French literature which he has taught and teaches at University of Pisa and University of Cassino.
He graduated in philosophy at the University of Rome and is an expert in French literature which he has taught and teaches at University of Pisa and University of Cassino.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 16, 2019
It saddens me that this book of contemporary poetry hasn’t received more attention. Valerio Magrelli has an extraordinary ability to explain the most mundane things and turn them into beautiful portraits and profound points. He is an exquisite artist with words.
There were at least ten poems about the duck-hare optical illusion toward the end of the book, which I found to be very amusing. I was intrigued by all the points he managed to make on the topic and impressed by his examination of duplicity through the illusion. I will never look at the duck-hare the same way again!
I loved that this book included the original of each poem written in Italian. While I do not know a word of the language, I think having both languages side by side makes this book really special.
I highly recommend this book for poetry lovers. There is a lot of beauty and depth within the prose.
There were at least ten poems about the duck-hare optical illusion toward the end of the book, which I found to be very amusing. I was intrigued by all the points he managed to make on the topic and impressed by his examination of duplicity through the illusion. I will never look at the duck-hare the same way again!
I loved that this book included the original of each poem written in Italian. While I do not know a word of the language, I think having both languages side by side makes this book really special.
I highly recommend this book for poetry lovers. There is a lot of beauty and depth within the prose.
November 2, 2022
One of the more involving books of verse I've read in quite awhile. By involving I mean pulled in. Sure, if you're not pulled in, or suspended, or however else you want to articulate the process, you're not going to get much out of verse in the first place, but there's something about Magrelli's work that really resonates with me.
The anthology offers work from his first five books, written from the 1980s to the mid 2000s, so you've got a fairly wide selection of his oeuvre; he's certainly of interest to watch develop his craft through time. He's moved beyond, far beyond the theatrics of transcendence or the cul de sac of self to produce compressed, strange mental rustlings like this,
There's a moment when the body
gathers itself in breathing
and thought stops and hesitates.
Likewise things
tugged by the moon
undergo the influence of
the tidal sigh, the malleable eclipse.
And the boats' planks
swell gently in water.
I'm not going to bury it in intertextuality, but the moment you read that, if you're familiar with French poetry of the 19th century (Magrelli has translated numerous French poets) both Mallarme and Rimbaud's presence are immediately apparent. This, on top of what would seem to be an observation of the relationship between mind and body. Note the direction of the impulse, it is of the flesh, with not the slightest whiff of the privileged mind. Mind as effect, not cause. Brilliant.
Magrelli is a poet who describes his work as "the catalogue of vegetation", the flora of his mind, which is a conceit I'm drawn more and more to as I age. There's relief there, I think, though one achieved by the turning down of light to a reasonable level and that shutting down the nattering, addled modern mind and its expectations and appetites.
Xochimilco
I build myself upon an absent column
-Hernri Michaux
Bindings, bandages, plants' beards
waft downward to the depths,
unite themselves with the soft,
the blind, the untouched,
echo-located abyss,
unite themselves with me.
Out of reeds is this earth made
-rafts, their bindings loosed, tongues
wagging to the pulse of wavelets.
My founding was ritual,
insentient-I spired from
a landspill, was born
from an ache, a lack;
pileworks, pick-up sticks, interstices,
a stake stuck in the void.
Hieratic, but upside down? Another one I got stuck on for quite awhile, I didn't find it particularly challenging to interpret but there's something about the tonal color, it felt to me like I was reading a clay baked tablet. A clay baked tablet of self. Again, here's a manner of trying to embed the mind by calling attention to its origins, this time literally. This third volume, titled, Typtological Exercises (there's something going on with the title as well as the English translation reflects the Italian misspelling of typological (tipologia)), looks to stabilize self by framing it in familiar space, sometimes those spaces, like Xochimilco, are historically loaded. Places of collapse for the most part, maybe places of profound moral failure.
One more, again from that third volume:
The Embrace
As you lie beside me I edge closer
taking sleep from your lips
as one wick draws flame from another.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins…
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.
The poems increase in complexity through the years. The poet of that first volume of what could be called calibrations of the self, gradually moves out into the world, and begins to order it. One volume does so by organizing the poems around the elements of a modern newspaper. Self as newspaper, an assemblage of this, that and everything else.
Finally, since it is a work of translation, it's also time to go through the usual exercise in hair pulling. Exactly whom am I reading here, Magrelli or Jamie McKendrick, the translator? McKendrick makes no bones about his approach, which is a very Poundian, intrusive sort of approach to translation. He's more interested in getting across motion and spirit (whatever that means) than literal word for word translation. Go back to that first poem offered, the phrase, "the malleable eclipse" has no counterpart in the original, the translator simply thought it worked. I agree. It's far from the only time he does so, even reorganizing some verse from longer, flowing lines to quick, staccato half lines. Ultimately McKendrick never irritated me, nor burst the bubble of suspension, he clearly respects the source but expresses it by, at times, riffing of his work. It's the final element of this anthology which made it such an involved, slow read.
The anthology offers work from his first five books, written from the 1980s to the mid 2000s, so you've got a fairly wide selection of his oeuvre; he's certainly of interest to watch develop his craft through time. He's moved beyond, far beyond the theatrics of transcendence or the cul de sac of self to produce compressed, strange mental rustlings like this,
There's a moment when the body
gathers itself in breathing
and thought stops and hesitates.
Likewise things
tugged by the moon
undergo the influence of
the tidal sigh, the malleable eclipse.
And the boats' planks
swell gently in water.
I'm not going to bury it in intertextuality, but the moment you read that, if you're familiar with French poetry of the 19th century (Magrelli has translated numerous French poets) both Mallarme and Rimbaud's presence are immediately apparent. This, on top of what would seem to be an observation of the relationship between mind and body. Note the direction of the impulse, it is of the flesh, with not the slightest whiff of the privileged mind. Mind as effect, not cause. Brilliant.
Magrelli is a poet who describes his work as "the catalogue of vegetation", the flora of his mind, which is a conceit I'm drawn more and more to as I age. There's relief there, I think, though one achieved by the turning down of light to a reasonable level and that shutting down the nattering, addled modern mind and its expectations and appetites.
Xochimilco
I build myself upon an absent column
-Hernri Michaux
Bindings, bandages, plants' beards
waft downward to the depths,
unite themselves with the soft,
the blind, the untouched,
echo-located abyss,
unite themselves with me.
Out of reeds is this earth made
-rafts, their bindings loosed, tongues
wagging to the pulse of wavelets.
My founding was ritual,
insentient-I spired from
a landspill, was born
from an ache, a lack;
pileworks, pick-up sticks, interstices,
a stake stuck in the void.
Hieratic, but upside down? Another one I got stuck on for quite awhile, I didn't find it particularly challenging to interpret but there's something about the tonal color, it felt to me like I was reading a clay baked tablet. A clay baked tablet of self. Again, here's a manner of trying to embed the mind by calling attention to its origins, this time literally. This third volume, titled, Typtological Exercises (there's something going on with the title as well as the English translation reflects the Italian misspelling of typological (tipologia)), looks to stabilize self by framing it in familiar space, sometimes those spaces, like Xochimilco, are historically loaded. Places of collapse for the most part, maybe places of profound moral failure.
One more, again from that third volume:
The Embrace
As you lie beside me I edge closer
taking sleep from your lips
as one wick draws flame from another.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins…
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.
The poems increase in complexity through the years. The poet of that first volume of what could be called calibrations of the self, gradually moves out into the world, and begins to order it. One volume does so by organizing the poems around the elements of a modern newspaper. Self as newspaper, an assemblage of this, that and everything else.
Finally, since it is a work of translation, it's also time to go through the usual exercise in hair pulling. Exactly whom am I reading here, Magrelli or Jamie McKendrick, the translator? McKendrick makes no bones about his approach, which is a very Poundian, intrusive sort of approach to translation. He's more interested in getting across motion and spirit (whatever that means) than literal word for word translation. Go back to that first poem offered, the phrase, "the malleable eclipse" has no counterpart in the original, the translator simply thought it worked. I agree. It's far from the only time he does so, even reorganizing some verse from longer, flowing lines to quick, staccato half lines. Ultimately McKendrick never irritated me, nor burst the bubble of suspension, he clearly respects the source but expresses it by, at times, riffing of his work. It's the final element of this anthology which made it such an involved, slow read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews